The Car's Beating Heart

Having interviewed Melville House's ace art director, Christopher King, not long ago, I thought I'd have a look at what other books Melville had scheduled for the rest of the year. Among those I already knew about (and want!) was something new, a novel by Christopher Boucher about a man doing his best to raise his hyperactive son--a son who happens to be a 1960s Volkswagen Beetle. And what a cover it has! Click for a much bigger version.

Even though I can barely move these days for books I've bought and have yet to read, not to mention those I have read, it's the promise offered by covers like this that keep the torrent of new books coming through the front door.

Getting Paid to Draw Dinosaurs: An Interview with Christopher King

Having raved recently over the wonderful cover design work coming from Melville House (on absolutely amazing books, I might add), I thought it would be good to interview the publisher's new art director, Christopher King, and he kindly agreed to make the time.

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CAUSTIC COVER CRITIC: What's your background as a designer? How did you get into book design?

CHRISTOPHER KING: My strongest interests when I was a kid were cartooning and paleontology. The dinosaur part didn't work out (I somehow failed to anticipate the viability of dinosaur comics), but I kept on drawing, and ended up studying graphic design at the University of North Texas, which has one of the most competitive art schools in the Southwestern US and which was, conveniently, close to my hometown of Fort Worth. I think my intention when I started was eventually to pursue editorial design, but being a bit of a bookworm, I decided to enroll in some literature classes, and they led to a real passion for great writers as well as a burgeoning interest in book design. I caught a lucky break when Rodrigo Corral asked me to intern at his studio in New York, and after that experience I knew I wanted to keep designing books. I moved to New York full time a year later to work in the art department at Doubleday, and since then I've also worked at St. Martin's Press and on my own as a freelancer. Last summer I took over as art director of Melville House, and, as I'm reminded on a daily basis, it's pretty much the best job ever.

CAUSTIC COVER CRITIC: Does working for a small, independent press give you more leeway for experimenting with cover designs? You don't have an army of sales reps and middle management to get interesting ideas past.

CHRISTOPHER KING: Well, we work with a distributor, so we actually do have a small army of (exceptionally smart and hardworking) sales reps, and they provide feedback on the covers at our seasonal sales meetings. You're right though—I do enjoy a great amount of freedom to experiment with ideas for the covers. Any designer who's ever faced the firing squad (a.k.a., packaging meetings) could appreciate what a relief it is to seek approval only from our two publishers, who are, remarkably, willing to indulge just about all of my harebrained schemes, and who are almost never heard to say, "make the title bigger."

Another difference is that I'm never asked to make a book "look" like a certain category or to directly copy another title, which most designers would probably agree is all too common in commercial publishing—one will notice that most American YA books now look like Twilight, and I'd be surprised if thrillers don't all start to look like imitations of the Millenium series in short order, based on the success of Peter Mendelsund's covers.. I think at Melville House we've found a niche in breaking from the norm, and I'm always encouraged to make our books stand out from the pack rather than blend in. As a designer it's a really exciting opportunity.

CAUSTIC COVER CRITIC: Melville House books almost never use stock images, going for new illustrative work or pure text. Can you talk a little about the decisions behind this?

CHRISTOPHER KING: This is definitely a case of using a little elbow grease to spin a limitation into an asset. Working at a small scale, our budget for art is limited, so, with some exceptions, I create most of the elements for the covers myself. It's a fun and rewarding way to work because it forces you to be resourceful, and it requires a level of thoughtfulness in your approach to the covers that you can't easily escape by finding a readymade image. In the end that thoughtfulness helps our books appeal to the kind of readers we're after. 

All of this means that when we do buy art for the covers, it's only in cases where it's especially meaningful or has the largest impact—for example, for our collection of final dispatches by the late Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, whose assassination is widely assumed to be linked to her reporting on the Putin administration, the cover features a striking photograph of the author by a Swedish photographer named Maria Söderberg. We'd kicked a few ideas around, but nothing seemed to work until I came across this photo. She looks so elegant, but there's a gravity in her eyes that betrays the magnitude of the atrocities she'd witnessed in Chechnya and elsewhere.

CAUSTIC COVER CRITIC: Are your beautiful Derek Raymond covers inspired by Marber? Who are your design heroes?

CHRISTOPHER KING: There's a whole soup of design references behind the Melville International Crime series, and mid-century Penguin covers are definitely a key ingredient—but in this case the Helvetica treatment is also intended to evoke the soullessness of Thatcherite Britain (think Trainspotting), which is the setting and subject of Raymond's novels. The biggest direct influence on the crime series as a whole, though, is Saul Bass's work with Alfred Hitchcock in the 1960s. That was an era when thrillers could be suspenseful and action-packed, sure, but they were smart too. So, while rehashing Bass's aesthetic wouldn't be productive (it's too emblematic of a specific period), his conceptual approach seems perfectly suited to this set of brainy international novels. It's a way of thinking about the genre that somehow got buried with the '60s, but it feels just as fresh now as it did then, and so I've tried to approach all the books in the series the way Bass might if he were working today.

As for design heroes, I have a whole pantheon of them, but I really admire designers whose work is always packed with smart ideas. Olly Moss's work is so simple, but so profoundly surprising and clever that the only possible response is to wonder why you didn't think of it first. Jason Munn of The Small Stakes and Jason Kernevich and Dustin Summers of The Heads of State crank out brilliant ideas at a rate that is frankly alarming, and Sam Potts's work boggles the mind.

Digging back in history a bit, George Lois achieved the kind of immediacy in his work, for Esquire especially, that I'm always striving for with my covers. I make no attempt to disguise the influence of pictorial modernists like the Beggarstaff brothers and Ludwig Hohlwein in my illustration work (Nazi propaganda aside), and the art and lettering created by the artists of the WPA during the Depression sneak in there sometimes too. And if the central challenge of designing a cover is to distill an entire story into a single compelling image, no one did it better than Norman Rockwell (although Adrian Tomine's New Yorker covers give him a run for his money).

Finally, I've had the great fortune to work alongside a lot of book designers whose talents far exceed mine, all of whom have left their mark in one way or another, and I'd be remiss if I didn't mention them here: Rodrigo Corral, Ben Wiseman, Christopher Brand, John Fontana, Emily Mahon, and Greg Mollica, plus Steve Snider, Henry Yee, LeeAnn Falciani, Jason Ramirez, Rob Grom, and the rest of the gang at St. Martin's. And of course, my predecessor at Melville House, Kelly Blair, left enormous shoes to fill, and I only hope we can continue to live up to the standard she set.

CAUSTIC COVER CRITIC: What are some recent covers of which you're most proud? What about older work?

CHRISTOPHER KING: The Lake was one of the first covers I tackled at Melville House and it presented a tough challenge, because the book is so hard to characterize—on the one hand, it's a simple, uplifting love story about two people overcoming grief through their love for each other. But on the other hand, there are elements of despair and dark mysticism. And although Banana Yoshimoto's writing has a quiet, literary quality, it's also accessible and broadly appealing. It took a number of tries to get the balance of all these elements right—first it was too dark, then too quiet, and so on—but I'm really happy with the finished jacket. Also, I can say without hesitation that The Lake is one of the best books I've ever worked on, and I think this one's going to blow up in a pretty major way.

Poetry After 9/11 was the first book Melville House ever published, and I got to design the package for a new edition, which will be released this fall to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the attacks and of our company. I wanted to communicate the book's central message—that there's still beauty after tragedy—with a cover that's sober and respectful, yet transcendent as well. One thing everyone remembers from that day is the image of papers raining down over the city, and my original instinct was to run a photo of them on the cover. But during the course of my research, I hit on a slightly different idea. I decided to ask my friend, the talented photographer Eric Ryan Anderson, to take on the challenge of capturing a stack of paper blowing away in the wind, and the image he created is so profoundly moving that it still leaves me speechless.

Among earlier work, Idiot America is a book I designed for the inimitable John Gall at Vintage last year, and it was a dream come true in more ways than one: as a huge NPR nerd, getting to work on a Charlie Pierce book is something akin to being an extra in your favorite actor's movie. But this cover also represented the fruition of all my childhood ambitions (see question 1). Needless to say, if you told my five-year-old self he would actually get paid to draw dinosaurs someday, he'd probably pee his pants.

CAUSTIC COVER CRITIC: What yet-to-be announced books are you currently designing covers for (if you're allowed to say)?

CHRISTOPHER KING: I've just wrapped up the catalog for Fall 2011, and I'm still in the dark about what the next list has in store, so I'm curious about what's coming myself—I always feel a bit like a kid on Christmas when we launch our new titles and I find out what I'll be working on for the next few months. I do know that we have some really exciting projects in development for the tenth anniversary of Melville House in 2012, but I don't think I can say quite yet what they'll be.... 

CAUSTIC COVER CRITIC: If you could persuade Dennis, Melville's publisher, to let you design, inside and out, without budget limitations, any book from the history of literature, what would it be?

CHRISTOPHER KING: This one's tricky, because I'm probably too close to my favorite books to be able to approach them objectively, but for years now I've been telling anyone who will listen that I'd love to do a thorough job of The Sound and the Fury, the kind of sturdy hardcover you'd keep with you for the rest of your life. That said, the book itself is already so visual—the type changing with each fleeting memory, and all those stark pages when Faulkner finally dispenses with sentences and punctuation altogether—that it barely needs designing. 

And while there are countless editions of Walden out there already, I'd like to see someone publish Thoreau's work as a more fully realized set, with the books and major essays as well as selections from the journals, in a really elegant, timeless design and with beautiful illustrations throughout. 

CAUSTIC COVER CRITIC: Is there any neglected book you'd love to draw to people's attention as something they should seek out?

CHRISTOPHER KING: Honestly, my colleagues are much better at finding these things than I am, so I'll defer to them: this is exactly the concept behind our new series, the Neversink Library, which aims to revive significant works of twentieth-century literature that have become neglected and fallen out of print. We have eight titles lined up for 2011, and I think readers will be shocked they don't know more about these books and their authors—that's been my reaction, anyway. Two of my favorites are After Midnight by Irmgard Keun and The War with the Newts by Karel Čapek, both of which were written in Europe during the years before the war and present a completely unexpected view of the politics of that era. 

Helping to bring important books like these to a wider audience is the reason I got into book design in the first place, and I feel really lucky to get to do it for a living. I'm having a blast and learning a lot working on all of these titles, and I hope it's evident when you see them on the shelf.

CAUSTIC COVER CRITIC: Thank you, Mr King!

Melvilles & Murder

Melville House are really kicking seventeen brands of arse with their book covers these days (see here, for example). Here are the first eleven books in their International Crime series.

I absolutely love these. They work as a series, with the limited palette, bold shapes, unflashy (but attractive) type and big fields of solid colour common to all. But then each author also gets their own identity within the series. The Kurkovs play wittily (and Saul Bass-ily) with the dinner-suit/penguin association, and the Derek Raymonds are just brilliant, reminiscent of old Romek Marber crime novel covers for Penguin.

I could kiss this publisher.

UPDATE: Kelly Blair did the Jakob Arjouni covers, and Christopher King did the Derek Raymond covers.

Mëlvïllës

Two sets of books coming from Melville House late this year and in the middle of next year. The latter set are the first books in a projected 'Neversink Library', and use a simple but stylish series of cover designs based on silhouettes.

I'm completely up for this series, because Irmgard Keun is great, that Simenon is really good, and the little-known (in English) Ödön von Horváth is fucking awesome.

More Germanic shenanigans start in December with these Heinrich Böll reprints, each of which uses stark symbols (mostly made up of circles and other simple shapes) to represent the book

And that title font has to be Mrs Eaves Italic, which is one of my favourites.

I have no information on the designers for either of these books. The Böll books are designed by Kelly Blair, and the Neversinks by Christopher King.

Best Books of the Year Part 4 [Not About Covers]

 (Continuing from here and here and here...)

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Roberto Bolaño: 2666
FSG, 2008

I went on and on about the design of this book here. It was the look of the thing, and a heartfelt recommendation from book designer Michael Kellner, which eventually persuaded me to read 2666, six months after everybody else had already read it and raved about it. You probably already know whether you intend to read it or not, based on the hype, so I'm not sure what I can say that will sway you if you are in the NO camp, but I'll try.

Bolaño's posthumously published, 900-page doorstopper is an intimidating but thoroughly rewarding book. In fact, in some ways, it's five books. Though all are interlinked, and the whole tells one big, complex story, it actually consists of three short and two long novels. The first is an academic satire about a group of literature professors seeking an obscure German writer in Mexico. The second book is about a Spaniard and his daughter moving to Mexico, and getting mixed up in things they don't really understand. The third book follows an American sports writer to Mexico on an assignment to cover a boxing match. The fourth, and longest (and sometimes hard to endure) part takes a look at a series of hundreds of horrific murders of poor Mexican women, and the fruitless police investigation (all, horribly, based on reality), told with the clinical distance and alarming detail of a forensic report. And the final part, which brings all the others together, is the life story of the mysterious German writer from the first section, from his birth, through the front lines of WWII, to his Mexican fate. All five books stand on their own, but read together are like nothing else I've come across.



Sylvia Townsend Warner: Lolly Willowes
Virago Modern Classics, 2000 (and NYRB, 1998)

The Virago Modern Classics are one of the Lost Great Things of modern literature (see also the Harvill/Panther paperbacks of the 1990s). From 1978 until some time in the 1990s, Virago put back into print some 400 books, mostly by women, which had been undeservedly forgotten or neglected. With their characteristic apple-green spines, these books were a wonderful collection of great novels, short stories and autobiographies. But then Virago was sold to Time Warner, and the list was savagely cut back. Now it's a shadow of its former self, but a few great books have survived: Antonia White, Elizabeth Taylor (the fantastic writer, not the appalling actress) and Rebecca West still have a few titles in print, though not all. Another amazing author who had a couple of books survive the purge was Sylvia Townsend Warner, who is also ably supported in the US by NYRB.  

Warner's short stories are brilliant, but good luck in finding them. Luckily, her novels are brilliant too, and Lolly Willowes might be the best of them. It starts as what might seem a straightforward repressed-woman-in-the-1900s narrative, but opens out to become someothing much odder and richer. It even seems to be parodying (though with more depth than any parody normally manages) books and films that hadn't even been written back in 1927, when it was first published--everything from the Elizabeth Gilbert-style middle-aged-woman-finds-herself memoirs that have boomed in bookshops over the last decade, to The Wicker Man. To say much more would be to spoil it, so I'll stop here.


Ron Currie, Jr: Everything Matters!
Viking, 2009

Before he is even born, Junior Thibodeax is hearing voices in his head, telling him that the world will end in 36 years. What's worse is that he's not mad, and the voices are telling the truth. They tell him other things, too--things he could never know otherwise--but they don't often tell him what he wants to know, and he can't really share his gift/curse with anyone in a way that they'll understand and believe him. Growing up with the indisputable fact of global destruction hanging over him, Junior's life goes understandably awry. He's unable to share his gift.

Taking in the end of everything, parallel universes and time loops, teenage sex, powerless gods and domestic terrorism, this could have been an appalling mess. Instead, it's a funny, clever and deeply touching novel: the sort of energetic, all-encompassing book that seems as though it could only have been wrtten by a young writer, but which seems much wiser than such youth should allow.


Hans Fallada: Alone in Berlin
Penguin Classics, 2009 (also Melville House, 2009, as Every Man Dies Alone)

I collect a lot of books about great forgotten books (often themselves out of print), listing reams of wonderful novels that never got the attention they deserved, or which vanished into oblivion despite one-time popularity. One writer who keeps popping up in these lists is German novelist Hans Fallada, who died in 1947. After years of neglect in the English-speaking world, Fallada is suddenly back in 2009, with more to come.

Alone in Berlin, Fallada's last book, is a story of the Germin resistance to the Nazis, based on a true story. Given his own troubled relationship to Hitler's regime, Fallada could well have chosen to write an uplifting tale of moral, upright citizens, defiant in the face of horror, working together to fight fascism--the sort of book Germans might have wanted to read in 1947. Instead, he produced this gripping, bleak thriller of hopelessness and petty revenge. The husband and wife at the centre of the story leave subversive postacrds all over Berlin, trying to change the minds of their fellow Germans, turning them against their Nazi masters. Most books would have pushed the light-in-the-darkness angle, but Fallada seems to view hope as something of a dirty trick, and the postacrds go astray, are ignored, or handed over to the authorities--and so the hunt is on for the subversive couple. To mention that this book is translated by Michael Hofmannis is to mention that it's translated masterfully.

Melville House also republished two other great novels by Fallada--Little Man, What Now? and The Drinker, both excellent--and are bringing out another, Wolf Among Wolves, in 2010.



Dash Shaw: Bottomless Belly Button
Fantagraphics, 2008

I can't add much more to what I already said here, but Bottomless Belly Button really is that good. And Shaw is only 26, which means he started writing and drawing this graphic novel when he was 22. It's depressing when other people are so talented and so young, and all you have to show for yourself is a blog and a series of foolish self-inflicted injuries.


 

Good & Bad

First, the good: in the comments to an earlier post on the Vintage Classics editions of Le Clézio, the ineffable Will turned up a scan of an earlier edition of War. The cover is a great 1970s thing.



Second, the bad: this is what happens when you rave about great covers in yet to be published books. These two lovely Fallada covers...




..seem to have mutated into these (sorry about the poor resolution)...



..which aren't actually bad (in fact, they're quite nice), but they're not a patch on the first versions. Now, as it's nearly Christmas, maybe if we all hold hands and are very good, Father Christmas will change them back.

Kelman and Cardstock

The most recent books put out by Vintage Classics (such as their three Le Clézios) have been a bit frustrating, as they've got lovely covers but no design credits (UPDATE: see a bit below). Two of their other recent re-releases are these two by James Kelman.



They're both very simple ideas, very well done. A Disaffection is the story of a, well, disaffected teacher, while How Late it Was, How Late features a protagonist who goes blind after a spot of police brutality. In the absence of actual information, I'm going to guess that they're the work of Jo Walker, who has done a number of other nifty covers for Vintage. They're the work of Anna Crone, which I would have realised if I'd looked closer at the actual book, and which John Self pointed out in the comments.

Kelman's other books have also recently been gussied up by small Scottish press Polygon, using nice card-stock covers with simple graphic elements. UPDATE: These covers are the work of Angus Hyland of Pentagram. He notes: "The spare cover imagery, which uses bold typography and individual icons to hold the series together, echoes Kelman’s direct writing style. The lettering for the titles is scanned from a collection of wood-cut type, alluding to Kelman’s apprenticeship as a printer."






Covers not printed onto standard white card are surprisingly uncommon, but they can be very groovy, especially with big bold chunks of colour, as on these previously posted, coming-in-2009 Melville House covers for two Hans Fallada books.




The best example of using beautiful, non-white card stock is probably that provided by the wonderful Pushkin Press, to be the subject of a future post. Their beautiful, small paperbacks use textured coloured card for the covers, and also watermarked, high-quality textured paper for the interior pages. They are books that need to be fondled, so these images won't quite do the trick, but the Gracq cover scan does show some of the detail.